Gretl Hanus, Mutter mit kind
Under the name of Franz Cisek, the Idbury Prints website has eight Viennese Expressionist linocuts and wood engravings dating from 1919-1922. But Cisek was not the artist; he was the teacher. A member of the Wiener Sezession, Cisek (Austrian, 1865-?) was hired by the artist Baron Felician Myrbach von Rheinfeld to teach at the Wiener Kunstgewerbeschule. There Cisek established a thriving youth class, and invented the linocut as a cheap and easy way of making relief prints. The extraordinarily accomplished works created in this class by young artists Ine Probst, Gretl Hanus, Auguste Richter, Willy Obransky, Alfred Schildee, and Hellmut Stanzel are testimony to a figure as important in the development of art education as Herbert Read, Marion Richardson, or Viktor Lowenfeld. So far as I know none of these young artists went on to a career in the fine arts.
Ine Probst, Wirthausgarten
